I was once asked to write a one-page story about corn. Here is my one-page story about corn.

“Turn off the TV,” Margaret said. “I need to talk to you. About our daughter.”

“What has she done now?” Carl asked without looking up from the screen.

Without a word, she tossed a magazine into his lap. Then he did look up, and the cold, worried look on her face, and the way her silk hung dryly in front of her eyes, made Carl turn off Starsky & Husk in mid-car chase.

He held up the magazine, and the title said everything he needed to know. Shuckers. He stared at that title, not wanting to let his eyes drift down to what he knew he would find on the cover. But he had to look. And he did.

There she was. His little girl. Husk pulled back to reveal just about everything from silk to stem. The look on her face clearly saying, “Shuck you, Daddy!”

Carl rose from his seat, shaking. Then the magazine was sailing across the room, chased by three suddenly popped kernels from Carl’s own steaming brow.

I know how this article ends because I’ve written it before. I wrote it two days ago and promptly lost it between the cushions of the Internet, and I’m now starting it again.

Losing my original writing and having to start over again has actually helped me to write an even better article, more clearly expressing what I was trying to get at the first time. That is, that writers should probably have a good idea of where they are going before they begin.

A friend of mine was recently reading Under the Dome by Stephen King. He said he was enjoying it so far and that it was exciting and a page-turner, but that he was worried about the ending. He was hoping it was all going to be worth it. I did my best to encourage him to keep reading without letting him know that, indeed, the ending sucked.

I don’t need to know!

In Under the Dome, a small New England town is mysteriously enclosed in a giant invisible dome. This gives King the chance to do what he does best: bounce a bunch of characters off each other—most of whom are a-holes—and see what happens. And in that sense, the book is a huge success. But the moment the first character asks, “What’s up with this invisible dome that just showed up out of nowhere?” I get very worried. When something huge and unexplainable happens in a TV show or book, the explanation is almost always “military experiments,” “aliens,” or some variation on “the Christmas spirit.”

And, if you know that one of these explanations is coming, when it finally does arrive it is so disappointing it makes you want to throw the book across the room.

But, like I said, I think the book on the whole is a success. The only huge disappointment is the explanation of the big unexplainable mystery posed at the beginning. This is something that has dogged a lot of long-form fiction. Many TV shows and novels draw a reader in with unexplainable mysteries so tantalizing that even though any explanation seems impossible, the reader or viewer just has to keep on watching or reading to see what could possibly be going on.

The two biggest recent examples I can think of are Lost and Battlestar Galactica. Both series drew audiences in with premises that were largely steeped in mysteries. What is the island? What is the smoke monster? Why do the Cylons want to kill the humans? What’s with the ghost Starbuck?

In the case of Battlestar Galactica, the finale was largely satisfying. But when it came to some questions that had kept people watching, the answers ended up being a resounding, “Uhhhhh….”

Another unanswered question: Why are Starbuck and Boomer both girls?

The ending of Lost was a mixture of that same “Uhhhh” mixed with “Dammit!” The “Uhhhh” from the mysteries the show just plain ignored, and the “Dammit” from the answers the show gave that either didn’t satisfy, or worse, were way too similar to theories that fans had in season one that the writers had flatly refuted.

Don’t bother asking.

Of course, its possible that no answers would be satisfying enough to match the tantalizing power of the mysteries themselves, but that’s a subject for another article (check your local listings!). The point is that when writers pose an intriguing mystery, they are setting themselves up for fan hatred down the road unless they’ve got it all worked out beforehand. Yes, they’ll buy themselves a lot of buzz and excitement as fans trade theories, but in the end, as in the case of Lost and to a lesser extent Battlestar Galactica, the fans will end up knowing that they’ve simply been toyed with for years.

It occurs to me that the only long running TV show that I can think of that had a number of huge mysteries at its core, and which eventually provided interesting and satisfying answers, was the often dorky but ultimately great science fiction show Babylon 5. Sometimes the reveals of these answers were clunky, other times they were properly, well, revelatory. But most importantly, by the end of the series, viewers had the sense that this five-year show was one cohesive story, and that it had been moving to that ending all along. And in fact, creator J. Michael Straczynski says that the entire arc of the story came to him in a flash all at once before he even started writing the show. Whether or not that is totally true, it feels true as you watch the show.

Dorky? Oh, yes. But satisfying!

I would argue that Lost, on the other hand, was a big case of the emperor’s new clothes and that the audience mistook teasing mysteries and non-linear storytelling for excitement and brilliance. It’s easy to make something seem cool when it’s unfinished. Because it could be anything, but you can’t imagine what. “There’s a bunker with food and a record collection underneath the island? What’s going ON??” Battlestar Galactica was more successful, though it was clear that when it came time to answering some of it’s most intriguing questions, the ones the audience most wanted explained, the frank answer from the writers was, “We honestly have no idea.” And Stephen King gave himself an excellent setting for his story, but it was a setting that required the kind of explanation he just could not provide.

I can’t beat up on him or any of these writers, because I’m currently in the same boat with a book I’m writing. I’ve got a neat situation that all these characters are running around in, but it’s a situation that demands an answer to the question, “How did this happen?” Or even “What is going on?” Do I flip a coin between “the military” or “aliens”? Or do I leave it frustratingly vague? Or do I promise to answer the questions in the next book?

Whichever I choose, I think I’d better figure out what I’m doing now, rather than try to retrofit some sense to things at the end. Otherwise I’ll be guilty, like a lot of writers, of stringing my readers along with a lot of what look like intriguing mysteries but are really just empty promises.

I think about my friend Hillary every day, but I’ve been thinking about her almost constantly since December 14th. Thirteen years ago she was carjacked and murdered by a lunatic. No guns were involved; just a knife and a crazy mind. And it was 100% random; she was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.

I was in the same room with Hillary’s killer at his trial. When he was first brought into the courtroom I braced myself, expecting a bolt of lighting and a crack of thunder. But he was just this gross, messed up, toothless old man who had had a shitty life and long history of robbing and killing.

Looking at this man–I don’t know why I’m not saying his name, it’s Leonard Young–and thinking about how random Hillary’s death was, it occurred to me that she was killed by an act of nature, even though it was the act of a person. It’s like she was killed in a hurricane, or drove off a slippery road, or was attacked by a mountain lion.

I could not bring myself to fully blame her killer. Of course he killed her; nothing in his history suggested that he wouldn’t kill a random person for the use of her car. I’m not excusing him at all. He’s on death row right now and that’s where he belongs. But I think that expecting to have been able to stop him from killing one of my dearest friends is just unrealistic.

Hillary’s death taught me many things. Maybe most of all it taught me that the world really is random, in ways that are brilliant and horrible. On the one hand, if I hadn’t met Hillary in 1990, I never would have moved to Chicago and would never have met my wife and had an awesome son in 2007. On the other hand, if Hillary had bought tomatoes the day before she died, she wouldn’t have needed to run out to the store on that day, and she would not have crossed paths with a crazy person. (Or if I had maybe called her more often it would have altered her timing just enough for her to miss being killed, but that’s just my brain, please ignore it, as I try to do.)

Part of the reason humans have societies or communities or governments is to try to impose some order on the chaos of the universe. We make laws, we put down roads, we make clocks, we get the electricity where it needs to go. But the chaos always gets through the cracks.

Since the shootings in Newtown, there have been dual debates raging about gun control and mental illness. The gun people are always quick to point out that people kill people, and that this shooter was mentally unstable. Those who understand mental health issues are quick to guard against unfair assumptions about the mentally ill, pointing out that not all mentally ill people are dangerous. Some don’t even agree on what mental illness is, or what kinds of conditions constitute dangerous mental illness. Others say that the ease with which anyone can obtain the kind of weaponry this shooter had is insane.

Aside from extremists on one side or the other, everyone is at least a little bit right in these arguments, especially those who include the cold hard truth that no matter what precautions we take, no matter what restrictions we put in place, the chaos will always sneak through.

I don’t pretend to know what a fair and logical solution would be for controlling the weaponry that’s out there, or for screening people for possibly dangerous mental issues without turning the mentally ill into boogeymen. And I don’t mean to say the world is just a crazy place where horrible things happen, so just deal with it.

I think, honestly, I’m just writing now because I’m sad about Sandy Hook, and I’m sad about Hillary Johnson, and I hate that there are no guarantees. When Hillary died, part of our grief was the powerlessness we felt, and I’m sure that’s what’s driving a lot of people now. We want desperately to be able to fix the world.

We know deep down that we can’t fix it. But we can make it a little better. We can make it harder for things to fall apart. The way in which we strive to define our society defines who we are. And in trying to make things better, we’ll not only ease our own minds, but we’ll strengthen this society that we must put our trust in.

My son is going to grow up, as we all did, in a chaotic world, but we’re not going to raise him to believe that there is no hope. We’re going to raise him to understand that the important thing is not that horrible things happen, because that is inevitable. The important thing is how we react, change, and grow with everything that comes our way.

How can you not judge a book by its cover? Especially if you haven’t read it? What else do you have to go on?

And when you’re a kid at a school book fair in, let’s say 1980, and the gym is filled with tables covered in book displays, and you find a book showing three kids running for their lives from gigantic tripod robots, how are you not supposed to decide on the spot that it’s the best book ever written?

The Best Book Ever Written? Looks like it!

I’ll cut right to the twist ending: I was that kid in 1980 when I found a copy of The White Mountains by John Christopher, the first of his Tripod Trilogy. For years, decades, it was featured prominently on the bookshelf in my room: One of the Best Books Ever Written. As I got older, it became one of the go-to touchstones of nostalgic conversations about how awesome my generation’s childhood was (even though the book was written in 1967). “Hey, what about The White Mountains?” “Is that the one with the tripods?” “Yes!” “I loved that book!”

Except that here’s the other twist: I never read the book until yesterday.

I had that thing on my shelf for something like twenty years, then it disappeared without me ever reading it. In a way, I didn’t have to. I already knew it was awesome based on the cover. Just the idea of kids versus giant robots (from space, I gleaned from the back cover) was awesome. And the fact that it had been written in England in the sixties but was still in print for a grade school book fair in Connecticut in 1980 suggested that it had something going on.

So last week I was reading a feature on the AV Club.com where people were talking about their favorite YA fiction, and Jason Heller wrote about the Tripod Trilogy, and even before I saw what he had to say about it I stopped reading and found the book on Amazon and “made it go on my Kindle,” as my mom would say. And I read it.

Is it the best book ever written? Even one of them? No, not at all. It’s a cool book, for all the reasons suggested by the cover, but it’s also pretty strange.

Will Parker is a teen living with his family in England hundreds of years after the Earth has been taken over by the Tripods. No one knows anything about the Tripods anymore, other than that when boys and girls reach puberty, the Tripods come to the village and “Cap” the kids, meaning they graft a metal mesh on their heads which renders them completely subservient to the rule of the Tripods. The day before his friend Jack’s Capping Day, the two discuss some doubts about just who and what the Tripods are, and if maybe being capped isn’t the best thing. But immediately after Jack’s capping, all of his doubts are gone, and so is his friendship with Will.

The bulk of the book is Will’s journey, with his two eventual companions, to find the White Mountains, a place where people supposedly live free from the Tripods’ influence. On their way they learn more about their world, and about the old world as they travel though ghost cities that have been dead for centuries.

One of the best aspects of the book—and probably one that would be most interesting to the younger readers the book is meant for—is seeing the spent leftovers of our world through the eyes of these kids who can only guess at what they are. What are those boxes on wheels that travel on steel rails, pulled by teams of horses? What’s this box with the numbered-and-lettered buttons on it? And what’s this egg-shaped thing and what happens when you pull this pin out of it?

On the other hand, much of the book is descriptions of traveling the countryside by foot, something most younger readers would almost have to skim over. And even when things get tense and the action ramps up, the sense of danger is often immediately deflated by things working out just fine, or by outside forces helping our heroes out.

The book does pick up as it goes along. And I have to say, by far the most effective scenes come at the climax, in the showdown between the boys and the Tripods depicted on that front cover on which I judged the book in the first place, 32 years before I read it. What comes immediately after this climax, however, is basically the words “The End.” This book ended so abruptly I actually shook my Kindle to see if the ending would fall out. It’s as if Star Wars ended with a title card that read, “And they blew up the Death Star.” Knowing that this is only the beginning of a longer series does ease that awkwardness a little, but I need to find out if it was originally written as the first part of a series, because if it wasn’t then this ending seems even weirder.

The flip side of all this quickness, abruptness, and lightness is that the book is enjoyably breezy. As a writer currently working on a genre book in which teens fight science fiction forces bigger than they are, I was pleased to see that an engaging story didn’t need to ponder its themes and events for pages and chapters in order to be effective. This is the trick with being an adult reading some YA fiction: The breeziness that the younger audience might require can seem to an adult reader either refreshingly economical or unsatisfyingly light. In the case of The White Mountains it’s a little of both.

But I’m excited to read the next two books in the series. I’m guessing that at the very least they will feature kids running for their lives from giant tripods.

When my son was around one or two I started reading him Dr. Seuss’s ABC. I got him the board book version because . . . .

Why did I get him the board book version? Because it was smaller? Harder to eat?

Anyway, we were reading the board book of Dr. Seuss’s ABC, and it was fine enough, as ABC books go. It had a nice consistent rhythm to it. “Big A, little a, what begins with A? Aunt Annie’s alligator. A…a…A.” And there’s, you know, an old lady riding an alligator.

What more could anyone ask?

Really, nothing. You got a camel on the ceiling for C. You got a crazy duck dog for D. A fiffer-feffer-feff for F. All very Seussian and good.

Until X.

I think I actually consciously thought to myself as I was reading, in a full sentence, “I wonder what ol’ Dr. Seuss will come up with for X?” Because, of course, every ABC book, poster, and placemat since the invention of the X-ray and the xylophone has had either X-ray or xylophone or both for X. Because what else is there? How do you draw a picture of a xenophobe? And what did ABC books use for X before the X-ray and the xylophone?

Who knows, but it shouldn’t matter in a Dr. Seuss ABC book, because he’s Dr. Seuss, as he’s already proven with the fiffer-feffer-feff. So what did he come up with for X?

A xucking X-ray and a godxam xylophone!

I would have thrown the book across the room (it could take it; it’s a board book), but that would not have been conducive to bedtime. Instead I stewed for a little bit, then let that stew cool and congeal into simple disappointment with a sprig of confusion on the edge of the plate. How did one of the most creative minds in children’s literature just decide to completely phone it in for X?

There actually was an answer to this question, but I didn’t discover it until I looked at the full, non-board version of the book.

The answer was, He didn’t phone it in! The board book people did!

Not only does the original version have about twice as much artwork and longer and more varied text, but it does something so revolutionary with X that I still can barely believe that it happened and that no one ever did it before.

“X is very useful is your name is Nixie Knox. It also comes in handy spelling ax and extra fox.”

I want to kiss Nixie Knox.

WHY has it taken I don’t know how many thousands of years of the English language for people to notice that there are letters on the insides of words too!? Not only does Dr. Seuss make a quantum leap by ignoring the need to use the initial letter for an ABC book, he also tells us why he’s doing it as he does it! X is useful! You need X. We all need X. Not just the Nixie Knoxes of the world, but anyone who has one too many foxes or any amount of axes. And that goes for all the letters of the alphabet. We need them no matter where they show up in the word. I just can’t believe that we didn’t figure this out as a species until 1963.

And that the board book people ignored it! It’s like colorizing the beginning and end of The Wizard of Oz. Or making a live-action movie of The Cat in the Hat or How the Grinch Stole Christmas. Or using the Lorax to sell SUVs. Wait, I’ve got something in my eye…

On the first day of English class in 7th grade, the teacher asked us to write down what books we were reading and who our favorite authors were. I’m not sure I was reading anything at the time, because nothing had been assigned to me, but I know that for my favorite author I wrote down the name of the only author I could think of: James Kahn, author of the novelization of Return of the Jedi, the last book I had read.

Most of the books I read on my own back then were novelizations of movies or even TV shows. Twilight Zone: The Movie, Poltergeist, Raiders of the Lost Ark. The only books I read that were not adapted from movies were books that had been adapted into movies. For Christmas of that year, my cousin David–who has been responsible for introducing me to almost every musician, author, and director I’m still into today–gave me two books: The Dead Zone by Stephen King and The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury. The Dead Zone had just been made into a movie, which equalled me wanting to see/read it, but it took me awhile to get to it. Probably because it was long.

The Martian Chronicles had already been made into a mostly bad, sometimes good miniseries starring Rock Hudson. I loved it at the time, because it was science fiction and I was a boy. Also Mars.

So I read The Martian Chronicles, and after I got over my confusion of not seeing Rock Hudson’s character in every story I realized I was reading the best book I had ever read. Bradbury’s Mars is beautiful and poetic, yes. But it’s also very frightening, cruel, heartbreaking, and cutthroat. And of course, that’s exactly what I discovered in his other books, which I dove head-first into after that. He was toe-to-toe with Stephen King as my new favorite author. My first favorite author. He was so good that he retroactively ruined some of my former favorite books. I had loved A Wrinkle in Time as a kid. When I reread it long after diving into Bradbury, my reaction was, “This. Book. Is. Terrible. This lady would love to be Ray Bradbury, and probably thinks she is, but oh boy…”

Bradbury was so important to me that for years whenever I liked a girl I would give her a copy of either The Last Picture Show by Larry McMurtry or Dandelion Wine. You know, so they’d see how brilliant I was and fall in love with me. Mostly they fell in love with Larry McMurtry and Ray Bradbury.

So even though he never got me a girlfriend, I still credit Mr. Bradbury with getting me excited about reading. Which is why in 1996 I ran to the Borders on Michigan Ave in Chicago to see him on his first ever (?!) book signing tour. I brought my tattered old paperbacks of Dandelion Wine and The Martian Chronicles for him to sign. I found out when I got there, though, that he would only be signing books purchased that day at the store. Bastards! So I grabbed a paperback of The Illustrated Man–which I hadn’t read yet??–waited in line, and was finally face-to-face with a man who in no small way changed my life.

At the time I was a grad student at Columbia College Chicago’s creative writing program. So I said to Ray, “Hi, I’m writing a paper for school about short story writers. So, uh, what do you have to say about writing stories?”

And he burst into this jubilant speech about how stories are what get you up in the morning, so that you can create something first thing and then enjoy that feeling for the rest of the day. I wish I could remember exactly what he said, but at the time my head was mostly buzzing with, “Look, it’s Ray Bradbury talking to me about stuff!”

And he signed my new copy of The Illustrated Man–which I hadn’t even paid for yet–and handed it back to me. I said, “Thanks, Ray Bradbury!” and then a bunch of years later he died. But all of his books are still on my shelf, including the one he held, signed, and handed back to me.

We recently moved to a new house and like the brilliant and organized fellow I am, I started going through my boxes of old stuff about five weeks after the move.

Luckily every piece of paper and plastic I’ve held onto over the last forty-something years is gold, so it’s not like I discovered I had moved a bunch of heavy boxes for nothing. Not at all.

Among the gems I found was this one-page story. Judging from the Beacon Street address and the suspiciously Brother word processor-like typeface, I’m going to say this was from college (I’m looking at you, Emerson!). And I think it actually was from an assignment to write a one-page story.

Here it is, complete and unabridged:

BUNNY

I didn’t mean to, but I ran over a rabbit as I was mowing the lawn. I didn’t really hurt him that bad, I guess–there was just a little piece of his left ear missing–but I felt lousy about it. I went out later with some lettuce. I thought it might be hungry. That night, the rabbit’s mom came to me in a dream. She was kind of mad. “You really need to be more careful with that lawn mower. It’s not a toy.” Then I saw that the rabbit was standing by his mother, hugging her leg tight and looking at me. He had a big bandage on his head. I felt bad all over again. I tried to explain to the mom rabbit that it was an accident. She said, “Accidents will happen, I know that. Just be more careful next time.” Then she left and I woke up feeling better.

That day I was driving to school and I ran over a cat. The cat’s dad came to me that night and said, “I guess you weren’t listening last night, huh?” I felt so bad. I tried to tell him that I was being careful but that the cat just ran right out of nowh-

“My kids don’t run out of nowhere, Mr. Human.” Being scolded by dads was always worse. “Just stop being so careless,” he said. “I don’t want to lose any more kids to you.”

I felt like crap. All the next day I was trying super hard to be careful until I accidentally bumped into a construction worker on the street and he fell into a manhole and died. The cop shoved me into the police car and said, “You’ll never learn.”